Soros Org Packing Up and Leaving Turkey After Very Unfriendly Reception

Olivier Hoslet / AFP / Getty ImagesGeorge Soros, Founder and Chairman of the Open Society Foundations arrives for a meeting in Brussels, on April 27, 2017. Meeting will mainly focus on situation in Hungary, including legislative measures that could force the closure of the Central European University in Budapest. (Olivier Hoslet / AFP / Getty Images)

There are some people in this world who are perceived as so manifestly terrible and disruptive to society at large that even people from vastly different ideologies and schools of thought can come together and agree that such people just need to go away.

Leftist billionaire philanthropist George Soros is one of those individuals. While Soros is already generally despised by most conservatives and moderates in America for his work at destabilizing the nation through the funding of a plethora of progressive groups, it appears he has also now drawn the ire of the Islamist leader of Turkey for reasons that, at least on the surface, appear to be remarkably similar.

The Guardian reported that Soros’ Open Societies Foundation has announced that it will cease operations and completely withdraw from the nation of Turkey. The announcement came in response to an accusation from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the progressive organization was attempting to undermine, divide and destroy his nation … the same sort of thing American conservatives accuse Soros of attempting to do.

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The Soros organization called the accusations baseless, of course, and asserted that the unwelcome reception it is receiving from the Turkish government has now made it impossible for it to continue doing whatever work it is that it does.

The real reason the Soros-funded Open Societies Foundation may have begun scrambling to extricate itself from Turkey is that it is also now reportedly under investigation by the Turkish Interior Ministry for alleged links to anti-government protests that occurred in Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013 — protests that the Soros organization denied having any involvement with.

However, a key associate of Soros — indeed, the founder of Soros’ operations in Turkey — named Hakan Altinay was detained by the government along with a dozen other individuals a little more than a week ago as part of the government’s investigation.

Altinay and the others were accused of providing support for a jailed civil rights activist named Osman Kavala, who himself stands accused of attempting to overthrow the government by way of the mass protests in 2013.

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Erdogan delivered a speech recently to local administrators in which he linked the recent arrests to both the 2013 protests and Soros. He reportedly said, “The person (Kavala) who financed terrorists during the Gezi incidents is already in prison.”

The Turkish president then set his attention to Soros, and in the process revealed that there is likely a bit of anti-Semitism mixed in with his nationalist defense of Turkish sovereignty as part of the overall opposition to Soros.

“And who is behind (Kavala)? The famous Hungarian Jew Soros. This is a man who assigns people to divide nations and shatter them. He has so much money and he spends it this way,“ Erdogan said.

The liberal media has recently embarked on a narrative that any and all criticism of Soros is rooted in anti-Semitism, and in the case of the Turkish president, that narrative is most likely at least partially correct.

But concerns over extremely wealthy individuals utilizing their vast funds to foment division and unrest among the peoples of sovereign nations has nothing to do with that individual’s religion, and instead is focused on the financing of subversive efforts to undermine patriotic nationalism and further the march toward socialistic globalism.

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As for the Soros organization, it seemed rather unconcerned to learn that it was being investigated by the Turkish government, and said in a statement to The Guardian, “These efforts are not new and they are outside reality.”

The organization added that it intends to apply for the legal liquidation of its assets and operations in Turkey as soon as possible.

It will be interesting to see if the Turkish government allows it to liquidate and leave or forces it to remain and be held accountable, depending upon how the investigation pans out.

As for Soros having to uproot his divisive globalist operations from Turkey, we can only dream that the same thing will one day occur here in America, as his financing of the progressive disruption to American society has been rejected by a substantial portion of the population.

Ben Marquis is a writer who identifies as a constitutional conservative/libertarian. He has covered current events and politics for Conservative Tribune since 2014. His focus is on protecting the First and Second Amendments.

Ben Marquis has covered current events and politics for Conservative Tribune since 2014. He reads voraciously and writes about the news of the day from a conservative-libertarian perspective. He is an advocate for a more constitutional government and a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, which protects the rest of our natural rights. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the love of his life as well as four dogs and four cats.